


blue jeans

by poisonmilkshake



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Love/Hate, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-20 00:20:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12421191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonmilkshake/pseuds/poisonmilkshake
Summary: A boy with too many secrets and a boy who has nothing to hide meet in an unconventional way. Chaos ensues.





	blue jeans

"So, how long has he been missing?" Pete's voice asks through the phone's speaker. He sounds tiny and far away. Mikey frowns.  
"Five days," he sighs, standing up from the bed to start pacing around the room again, using the hand that isn't holding the phone to his ear to push his glasses up and then take his beanie off.  
"Wasn't that the day of the funeral?" Pete asks then, as Mikey throws his beanie on the desk and tries to smooth down his hair by brushing through the locks with his fingers.  
He sighs again, walking to stand in front of the mirror. "No, it was the day after grandma died. He missed the funeral, we don't know where he is. Or if something happened to him." His hair is sticking up in all directions, he gives up on taming it.  
"But I saw him at the cemetery, the day of the funeral," Pete says, a hint of confusion in his voice. Mikey's frown deepens as he turns around and starts pacing again.  
"Really?"  
"Yeah, when we were leaving, he was standing in front of her grave. I mean, I'm pretty sure it was him."  
"Mother _fucker_ ," Mikey almost growls, sitting back down on the bed. He leans with his elbows on his knees and starts pushing his fingers under his glasses to rub angrily at his eyes. "He's hiding, I can't believe this."  
"Aw, come on Mikey, weren't they- weren't they really close?" Pete says, obviously trying to calm Mikey down by putting the whole situation into a more objective perspective.  
"Yeah, they were," Mikey says, and he's started to fuss with his hair again, his eyes closed.  
"See, maybe that's just his way of coping with the loss?"  
"He could fuckin' cope without leaving me alone!" Mikey retorts, opening his eyes as he starts gesticulating with his free hand, "My family's, like, falling apart, and I'm the one who has to make sure mom doesn't lose her shit, 'cause dad spends all his time out getting drunk and- and he's always in a bad mood. They aren't even speaking to each other. I'm fucking fourteen! I'm not supposed to be dealing with this kinda stuff! I don't know how to deal with this kinda stuff!"  
"Well, Gerard's fifteen, why do you think he knows how to deal with it?" Pete shoots back.  
"That's not what I said!" Mikey shouts, forgetting for a second that he and Pete are not fighting, that he's the one who called Pete to rant about his problems and Pete's just trying to help him. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, letting the darkness clear his head. When he speaks again, he's calm. "I just want him to be home, so I can make sure he's okay and mom stops convincing herself that he's dead and she has to go looking for his corpse out there in the fuckin' snow. I mean, come on, it's the middle of December, where the fuck is he even staying?"  
"Okay but don't- don't take my word for granted, alright? Maybe it wasn't even him at the cemetery, it was far away, it could have easily been someone else-" Pete is saying, but he's interrupted by Mikey's mum calling him downstairs to have dinner. Mikey excuses himself, says goodbye, and with one last exasperated sigh he's out if his room, walking towards the stairs.  
After dinner, Mikey is trying not to look at his mother's face, distracting himself by making coffee, because she looks devastated and he can't handle it. He's been comforting her every night until she cries herself to sleep, if she even sleeps at all, but there's only so much stress he can take, and he thinks his mother is probably having an emotional breakdown. He has to talk her down from going to look for her oldest son in the craziest places all the time.  
Mikey lets his mother's paranoia get to him for a second, and an image flashes through his mind, his brother's corpse, pale and blue, red with blood, rigid and frozen, half-hidden under the layers of snow that have fallen down in the few previous weeks. Old memories of going fishing at a lake, a few towns away, with his father and a family friend, owner of a boat, come to his mind; how the fish fought against death when they were pulled out of the water, laid down on ice so they wouldn't start rotting. How they looked once they died, with glassy eyes and dried scales that used to sparkle under the water. Going at Helena's old house, by the town's park, afterwards, and eating cookies that she'd baked, the house where she lived up until she was too sick to live on her own. She had to stay in the hospital for the last few months of her life. And now the house is Gerard's, because that's what was written on her will, and she left for Mikey a sum of money that he's supposed to use for college. Mikey doesn't really know how those things work, but he supposes that their parents actually own the house until Gerard turns 18.  
Mikey looks down at his cup, still empty as the coffee keeps brewing. The fishing trips were back when their father was sober, when he still had friends that didn't spend all their time sitting at a bar. Gerard used to hate fishing, he didn't want the fish to die, and the fishhooks, they scared him because they reminded him of needles. But he has admitted to Mikey that he'd rather go fishing every day than seeing dad drunk again. It's odd to think that Gerard might be like one of those fish now, dead eyes and dry skin. Mikey closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, letting the darkness clear his head.  
It's not something that could have happened, he knows, Gerard isn't dead, because unlike his mother, he's using logic: their town is small and quiet, and no one has been murdered there in decades. And no one, as far as he knows, has any reason to kill his brother.  
But even Mikey's poker-faced facade of logic and positive thinking is starting to wear thin.  
He wonders if Gerard would fight against death.  
He pours the coffee in his cup with slightly trembling hands, relishing in the smell of the only thing that's keeping him together. Of course he's worried for his brother, and after all, he's he's worried about his mother too, because he has never seen her cry before. The first time was after the phone call from the hospital that informed them of Helena's death. It shook the ground under his feet. The two big tears that rolled down her cheeks, the pain on her face, broke his firm belief that grown-ups are indestructible.  
After pouring the rest of the coffee in another cup for his mother, he breaks the promise he'd made to himself, and lets his eyes wander over his mother's face. She's smoking, sitting at the kitchen table, and she's been looking at him while he made the coffee. She has deep, dark circles under her eyes, and her lips are pale and chapped. She usually wears bold make-up and her blonde hair is always big and fluffy, "like a beauty queen's," she loves to point out, but in this moment her hair is flat on her head, kind of messy, and the lack of make-up mixed with her sickly look makes her seem so much older and more tired than she actually is, like she's lived a thousand lives.  
Mikey gently places the cup between her waiting hands, kisses her forehead, and makes his promise again: don't look at mum's face.  
She crushes the cigarette on the ashtray, stands up, and they move to the living room, where Mikey sits beside her on the couch, staring at his cup of coffee for a second before bringing it to his lips. They don't talk, but it's a comfortable silence, if a sad one. His mother puts her arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer and wrapping them both in the big, fluffy blanket that was resting, folded messily, on the side of the couch before they sat down. They move carefully, mindful of not letting the coffee spill. Mikey cuddles into her side, tucking his socked feet under himself. He sips his coffee, listening to the fire crackling softly in the fireplace and staring at the people moving on the muted tv's screen. He tries to reassure himself, repeating in his head what Pete said about seeing Gerard at the funeral, but still, Pete wasn't even sure of it himself. So, instead of giving into paranoia again, he goes back to staring at the tv and tries to make out what kind of movie it is without the sound. When a blonde girl gets stabbed, he figures it's a horror movie.  
Obligatory Blonde Chick Death: check.  
Sooner than he knows, the end credits are rolling on the screen, and he blinks himself out of his stupor. His coffee has gone cold, some of it spilled on the blanket. He stares at the little drops, now dry, that probably won't get out of the fabric anytime soon, and then he looks at his mum.  
Her cup is empty, she's asleep, but at least this time there are no dry tears on her face. He quietly moves away, taking the empty cup from her hands, and setting it beside his on the coffee table. He lays her down, gently placing her head on a pillow, and tucks her under the blanket. She's a heavy sleeper, when worry is not keeping her up, so she doesn't even stir.  
Mikey then crouches down in front of the fire, adding some wood and moving it around to bring it back to life. He takes his cup and moves it to the edge of the fireplace, to make it warm up again. He leaves it there while he takes mum's cup to the kitchen, walking around the house without turning the lights on, leaving it in the sink so that someone will wash it in the morning.  
Coming back in the living room, his eyes find once again the figure of his mother, and suddenly, all the times that he found Gerard curled up on the couch, in the morning, with a blanket wrapped around him come back to his mind. He briefly wonders how many times his mum and his brother have spent nights like that, and a small pang of jealousy hits him. He quickly suppresses it though, because he knows Gerard has always been a huge insomniac, but he would never wake Mikey up in the middle of the night so they could pull an all-nighter together. Mikey feels that insomnia has made Gerard value sleep a lot more than he does. Especially since, unlike his big brother, he somehow manages to fall asleep anywhere.  
He walks over to the fireplace, picks up his cup. It's warm, but the coffee inside is still kind of cold. Then, he hears the sound of keys coming from outside. The keys are pushed in the lock, the lock turns, the door opens. 'Dad is back,' Mikey thinks.  
He sets the cup down on the fireplace again. He expected the sound of the door slamming closed, footsteps dragging and stomping in the hallway, towards the stairs, heavy with alcohol, but instead, the door closes quietly, and soon it' s locked again. Mikey hears someone shuffling around in the kitchen. He listens for a few seconds, and then stands up, quietly walks towards the kitchen, and, standing in the doorway, turns the light on.  
There's Gerard, standing in front of the counter, wearing different clothes from the ones Mikey last saw him wearing. He looks like a deer caught in headlights, a piece of toast with Nutella, that he somehow found in the dark, and that Mikey had made for himself to eat the next morning, shoved halfway in his mouth, the plastic bag that used to contain the toast empty in his other hand, his eyes wide, staring at Mikey. There are a lot of things Mikey wants to say, which is why he's the first to speak.  
"You look like a burglar in your own house," he says. A hint of disappointment is the only thing he lets through his otherwise carefully flat tone and face.  
Gerard tears a piece of toast off with his teeth, his expression shifts from scared to curious, and he doesn't even bother swallowing before replying with "Why are you still awake?"  
Mikey doesn't answer, instead, he replies with another question: "Where the hell have you been?" he asks with urgency in his voice, but speaks quietly this time, because he remembers their mother sleeping in the living room. "Nowhere" Gerard answers after swallowing his food, looking away and mimicking Mikey's tone, probably understanding that they can't speak loudly.  
Mikey glares at him. "Listen, Helena dies and you disappear for five days in the middle of December, when there's snow up everyone's asses and it's so cold you could easily die of hypothermia, mom was going crazy, dad is drinking his ass off and being a dick, and I had to make sure they didn't kill each other every night. Don't 'nowhere' me. Where the fuck have you been?"  
Mikey almost forgot to keep his voice down this time. Because, as relieved as he is that Gerard is back, he's also angry, since clearly, nothing bad has happened to him. Of course, he didn't want anything to happen to his brother, but the fact that he's okay means he had no reason to disappear for so long.  
"I don't wanna talk about it," Gerard answers, and for a second, Mikey thought he saw something flashing across his face, but it was gone before he could make sure he wasn't imagining it, because Gerard is leaving, walking towards the stairs that go down to his room.  
"Go to sleep Mikes," he hears Gerard say from the top of the stairs, and then the door to his room closes, and Mikey is left standing at the entrance to the kitchen with a sense of dissatisfaction and even more questions, listening to his brother's steps going down the stairs and his mother's quiet snoring accompanied by the crackling of the fire from the living room. He sighs, realising that he didn't mention the toast before Gerard left the kitchen, and by now it's too late to have it back. He thinks about waking his mom up to tell her Gerard's back, but then decides he can't deal with drama right now, and she probably wouldn't be able to fall back asleep afterwards. He goes to retrieve his cup of coffee from the fireplace, puts it in the sink, turns the light off, and then goes up to his room, dialing Pete's number for the second time that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm finally fuckin' posting this.  
> thanks jimmy for letting me rant about this story to him for the past 4 or so years, you are one patient dude.  
> and thanks ty for helping me figure some shit out and _also_ letting me rant about this.


End file.
